Carnevali was about to be committed to an insane asylum in the Midwest, where he had followed Dawson, abandoning his wife and children in New York. At the time Carnevali believed he was God—“although we both decided that it was undesirable to become God,” writes Dawson, “without also remaining human.”
Ridge’s timing with regard to another handout was bad: Carnevali was writing the same kind of letter: “I can’t leave the hospital until you send some dough.” Eventually he was diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica, a disease that caused him to shake uncontrollably. He returned to Italy in 1922, to die slowly and very painfully twenty years later.
Chapter 18
Sun-up and Other Poems
The New York Times gave Ridge’s second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, a rave review, saying that Ridge “takes a foremost place of any American woman writing poetry.” The Bookman echoed this with “among the very best of women poets.” Published in the fall of 1920, again by Huebsch, its 34-page, three-part title poem “Sun-up,” set in a melded New Zealand/Australia, is particularly striking for the precision of the child Betty’s nightmarish vision. After declaring that the book “will inevitably be judged by the pioneer work of James Joyce,” The Dial called it “acidly translated truth.” The Nation said with “Freud rather than Plato…read back into the infant mind,” it had an “honesty so quick as to be diabolical.” The poem has a particularly contemporary appeal.
The girl with the black eyes holds you tight,
and you run… and run
past the wild, wild towers …
and trees in the gardens tugging at their feet
and little frightened dolls
shut up in the shops
crying…and crying…because no one stops…
you spin like a penny thrown out in the street.
Then a man clutches her by the hair…
He always clutches her by the hair…
His eyes stick out like spears.
You see her pulled-back face
and her black, black eyes
lit up by the glare…(Sun-up 4-5)
It’s not Blake and it’s not naïve. It is also not the distanced childhood of the reminiscences of the boy in “Birches” by Frost, nor the cloying nostalgia of Longfellow remembering “My Lost Youth.” Such a searing voice would not be heard again in the persona of a child for another fifty years, with the bad boys in “A Child’s Christmas In Wales” by Dylan Thomas, and not from a woman until perhaps May Swenson’s mild “The Centaur” in 1955. Ridge’s little girl Betty pulls off the legs of flies, and her mama admonishes: “When Nero was a little boy/he caught flies on his mama’s window/…and nobody loved him.” But Betty likes “the picture of the Flood/and the little babies getting drowned.” When a boy exposes himself to her, Betty is not at all cowed and certainly not impressed: “You wonder/if God has spoiled Jimmy.” She is told not to play with the children in the alley:
But you must be very polite—
so you pass them and say good day
and when they fling banana skins
you fling them back again. (Sun-up 8)
The New York Call reviewer said of Betty that “She is not to be patted on the head or bought with candy.”
Celia never minded if you slapped her
when the comb made your hairs ache,
but though you rub your cheek against mama’s hand
she has not said darling since….
Now I will slap her again….
I will bite her hand till it bleeds. (Sun-up 6)
Janie, the doll Betty receives for Christmas, is much abused and then discarded.
Yesterday
I took Janie out
and tied my handkerchief over her face
and put sand in it
and threw her into the ditch
down in the black water
under the dock leaves…
and when mama asked me where Janie was
I said I had lost her. (Sun-up 22)
Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man six years earlier, with its opening story immersed in a child’s point of view that prefigured the stream of consciousness of his Ulysses, but his protagonist is not nearly as complex as Betty. Remember all those Barbies with their heads torn off, scalped, with arms missing? These are the poems of the interior mind of a girl who is unfettered by gender expectations. The tone is dreamy in the way that events present to someone with little experience in the world, and paradoxically matter-of-fact. After Betty discovers beauty from her mother’s appreciation of a cabbage, they eat it the next day.
The greens-man gave her a cabbage
and she held it against her black bodice
and said what a beautiful green it was
and put it on the table
as though it had been a flower.
But the next day we boiled and ate it with salt.
It was our dinner. (Sun-up 9)
When her mother leaves her in the care of neighbors, Betty fears she’ll never return.
But suppose
that day after day
you were to watch for her face
and it didn’t come back?
Suppose
it were to drop out of the string of white faces
like the pearl out of my chain
I never found again? (Sun-up 10)
“Sun-up” also contains the eerie re-telling of the lullaby, “O for the light of thine eyes Dolores.”(Another of Ridge’s nicknames is Dolores). In it
…the sea roars like lions.
It leaps at the castle
and the cliff knocks it down
but always the sea
shakes its flattened head
and gets up again. (Sun-up 14)
The “castle has no roof/so the rain spins silver webs in it” and Dolores’ face “floats dim and beautiful/the way flowers do when they are drowned,” and when she tries to walk up the castle stairs “the stair goes up into the sky/and the sky keeps going up too,/so none of them ever get there.” Although the poem is framed in a child’s perception, the frustration running beneath its fairytale-like narrative is adult.
Not long after Betty abandons her doll, Ridge prefigures Williams’s “No ideas except in things,” written seven years later in Paterson, by recognizing a shadow for itself:
But there is a shadow
that is not the shadow of a thing…
it is a thing itself.
When you meet this shadow
you must not look at it too long…
it grows with your looking at it…
till you are all alone
with nothing around you…
nothing…nothing…nothing…
but a shadow
with its eyes full of black light. (Sun-up 27)
In the final section of the poem, Betty adopts an imaginary playmate named Jude. “Mama peeps out the window and smiles./She thinks/I am playing with myself….” Jude is her antithesis: “Jude isn’t afraid of shadows—/not even of the ones that have eyes in them…” But the section is more about Betty’s ambivalence with her mother’s expectations than the imaginary Jude.
When you tell mama
you are going to do something great
she looks at you
as though you were a window
she were trying to see through,
and says she hopes you will be good
instead of great. (Sun-up 29)
Was the mother hoping to shield the child from disappointment by lowering the bar? Or did she mean “good” in terms of “good behavior?” Betty sounds extremely challenging to parent. Twenty-five lines after the admonition to do something “great,” Ridge writes about the slim rewards of such greatness:
…When you do something great
people give you a stone face,
so you do not care any more
when the sun throws gold on you
through leaf-holes the wind makes
in green
bushes….(Sun-up 30)
Bitterness has been learned. All that ambition, all those years of writing draft after draft, hoping for recognition—Ridge is now 47 years old. She has retreated into her pre-adult psyche. Like fellow New Zealander Mansfield’s poetic prose in “Prelude,” “At the Bay,” and “The Doll’s House,” Ursula Bethell’s sequence of poems, “By the River Ashley,” and Robin Hyde’s sequence, “Houses by the Sea,” Ridge’s “Sun-up” holds up to the light what had been forgotten or considered trivial about her childhood, where the self of consequence is hidden. While Bethell’s work sought to escape Victorian constraints, Mansfield’s shone with emotive detail, and Hyde’s revealed a world full of difficulty, Ridge’s poem allows Betty to reveal her own method for maintaining courage and perseverance:
Sometimes…before rain…
when the stars have gone inside…
the night comes close to your window
and sniffs at the light….
But you must not run away—
you must keep your face to the night
and walk backward. (Sun-up 17-18)
“You can love people very much/and never, never, never forgive them” is the piece of advice the alter-ego Jude tells Betty. Betty encounters a boy more wicked then herself, a boy who strikes her to the ground with a whip. “He is the kind of boy you knew when you had Celia…/with nice clothes on and curls,” she writes, describing her loss of socio-economic status. The speaker then plots to burn the boy alive.
I know now
what I shall do….
I will set fire to him
and he will burn up into a tall flame—
he will scream into the sky
and sparks will fly out of him—
he will burn and burn…
and his blazing hair
shall light up the world. (Sun-up 36)
Betty anticipates that her mother will begin to question whether her friend Jude is real, since “the grass didn’t fall down under his feet.” But Jude is more than imaginary by now, he is her male id. As the book began with an invocation to the mother whose “hand throws something in the fire,” this poems ends with full acknowledgement of her influence over Betty’s aberrant, albeit unconscious, bisexual nature.
[Jude] is fading now…
He is just lines…like a drawing….
You can see mama in between.
When she moves
she rubs some of him out. (Sun-up 36)
The second half of the book is an extended reverie on sex and its secrets. The first section is entitled “Monologues,” which suggests that the speaker is Ridge herself. “Jaguar,” dedicated to Scott, has this speaker noting the “publicity of windows/stoning me with pent-up cries” and predicts that she too will hide “in a crevice in the night.” “Wild Duck” is an aubade in which the speaker is “singing a hot sweet song to the super-stars,” and then nonchalantly brushes off the lover—“Twas a great night…” “The Dream” follows, with its invocation to Sydney, so perhaps the aubade referred to a failed romance in Australia. “Altitude” opens with: “I wonder/how it would be here with you” with “pain” as “the remote hunger of droning things, and with anger “but a little silence/sinking into the great silence.” Another boyfriend is rejected in “Nocturne:” “What are you to me, boy,” she writes, then finishes him off with a creepy metaphor: “That I, who have passed so many nights,/Should carry your eyes/Like swinging lanterns?” “Cactus Seed,” which ends the section, continues her theme of surveillance with the line: “And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees.” In the next section, “Time-Stone” has the moon breaking a date with the City, “Playing virgin after all her encounters.” In “Train Window” she asks: “how many codes for a wireless whisper” followed naturally by “Scandal,” and then “Electricity” in which
the charged phalluses of iron leaping
Female and male,
Complete, indivisible, one,
Fused into light.
The final lines of “Skyscrapers” are “I know your secrets…better than all the policemen/like fat blue mullet along the avenues.”
In the last two poems of the section, Ridge returns to her dark take on the metropolis. Most of Ridge’s contemporaries—very much including Hart Crane—have been publishing poems about the excitement of the city, its skyscrapers and bridges and night life. Ridge’s poems view its industrialization like a steampunk sci-fi video game with great computer-generated graphics, but rarely positively. The imagist “East River” and its pounding guttural last line is a particularly graphic example.
East River
Dour river
Jaded with monotony of lights
Diving off mast heads…
Lights mad with creating in a river…turning its sullen back…
Heave up, river…
Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light…
The night will gut what you give her. (Sun-up 57)
“Wall Street at Night” obliquely renders Ridge’s distaste of capitalism with the evocation of light and shadow—and dead bodies.
Wall Street at Night
Long vast shapes…cooled and flushed through with darkness…
Lidless windows
Glazed with a flashy luster
From some little pert café chirping up like a sparrow.
And down among iron guts
Piled silver
Throwing gray spatter of light…pale without heat…
Like the pallor of dead bodies. (Sun-up 56)
The fourth section of the book is actually titled “Secrets.” It contains “After Storm,” which ends with “Silence/builds her wall/about a dream impaled.” Is this a blatantly Freudian flaunting of a secret? Freud was all the rage at the time, and Ridge owned his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, new that year. The third poem in the section takes the title “Secrets,” and begins in dream with something sexual going on: “did you enter my wound from another wound/brushing mine in a crowd…”
“One thing I am sure of always is my love for you—your man size courage and woman size understanding and your complex bi-sexual brain,” writes Evelyn Scott to Ridge in 1920, the year of Sun-up’s publication. Such compliments were reciprocated. Along with “Jaguar,” Ridge included a second poem dedicated to her. Like “Jaguar,” “To E.S.” is not the usual positive paean to friendship. Scott’s first book, Precipitations, published that year, has lines like: “She is Death enjoying Life,/Innocently,/Lasciviously.”
Or you kissing and picking over fresh deaths…
Filth…worms…flowers…
Green and succulent pods…
………………………….
Nothing buried or thrown away.
Only the moon like a white sheet
Spread over the dead you carry. (Sun-up 70)
The mob is the subject of Ridge’s four-part “Sons of Belial, a poem that aims to force the reader to recognize his complicity with group violence. “Belial” is a Hebrew word for devil. Her first example of mob violence—“We beat at a door/In Gilead”—refers to the story of the Levite who offered his concubine to the mob instead of himself. The mob had wanted to rape him, but settled for her. The poem mentions the Alexandrian Hypatia, the first female mathematician. According to Gibbon, a Christian mob flayed her alive with oyster shells for exacerbating a conflict with the Jews. Was Ridge experiencing criticism over her Ghetto book? The poem’s mob nails Christ to a tree and Rosa Luxemburg makes an appearance. The most memorable lines occur toward the end, where the poem refers to the KKK, then on the rise—“Mad nights when we make ritual”—and their lynchings: “We make rope do rigadoons/with copper feet that jig on air….”
“In Harness” begins the last section. About the singing of the French national anthem in a sweatshop, its details, so precise, suggest Ridge’s employment there, one of which is the mention of orgasms. “The girl with adenoids/rocks on her hams…./Her feet beat a wild tattoo—,” and gr
aphically: “head flung back and pelvis lifting to the white body of the sun.” Climax happened frequently to women who pressed their thighs together while using the treadle for so many hours, and foremen were told to listen for runaway sewing machines. The poem ends brilliantly, with French and American moneygrubbers going off to lunch while the anthem plays and the speaker equates “a racing mare” hitched to a grocer’s cart to all those strong women at their sewing machines. Putting this forbidden sexual act before the next poem, “Reveille,” which aimed to rouse the masses to action—“they think they have tamed you”—confirms that the revolution Ridge wanted was not only political.
“To Larkin,” the second to last poem in the book, is dedicated to the Irish activist Jim Larkin, a very successful trade unionist who was arrested in the Palmer raids on an extended visit to the U.S., and jailed in Sing Sing for anarchism. According to historian Lillian Symes, “Larkin…combined Marxism with Catholicism, Irish patriotism with internationalism, irrational prejudices with economic logic.” As Ridge writes: “One hundred million men and women go inevitably about their affairs…”
They do not see you go by their windows, Jim Larkin,
with your eyes bloody as the sunset
And your shadow gaunt upon the sky…
You, and the like of you, that life
Is crushing for their frantic wines. (Sun-up 92)
In addition to this paean to labor activism, the book also contains her poems to Berkman and Goldman. Given the recent deportation of the two anarchists under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act the following year, and the Senate Committee investigations in which Ridge is named, Huebsch, in publishing this book, risked being indicted. Despite such political forthrightness, even the mild Marianne Moore admired the work. In a note after its publication, Mary Moore, Marianne’s mother, included her daughter’s praise: “Marianne takes great pride in the achievement you have made in your precious book.” Ridge was delighted by Sun-up’s reception. She wrote her publisher that “three different people have told me that I am the greatest poet in America.” Based on hearsay, these included Philip Moiller, a Yiddish theater producer, Edward Arlington Robinson, by way of her friend and editor of Outlook, Otto Theis, and Willa Cather who was said to have told another friend that Ridge “was doing better work than any of the modern Americans.”
Anything That Burns You Page 18
